“Current state of B2B advertising is archaic because all the innovations in the field are driven by the needs of B2C marketers,” says Natify Founder and CEO Markus Stahlberg. As a B2B marketer today, you either need to accept that up to 80% of your ad spending essentially gets wasted on irrelevant audiences or to optimize an insignificant aspect of your business that you can’t scale. With the $84B annual digital spending in the US alone, the B2B market poses a huge but complex opportunity because of the lack of a clear market leader from the likes of Google and Facebook.

According to Stahlberg, the very complexity of B2B market with its long buying cycles, big deal sizes and multiple stakeholders in decision making make it an ideal environment for AI. “As opposed to brand building, content is the driving force behind B2B engagement. Content engagement data is the Holy Grail that tells you everything you need to know about the complex B2B buying journey. In B2B AI, the principal idea is to expose this data to an innovative combination of semantic analysis and an AI approach called approximate Bayesian inference to accurately identify the intentions of the B2B decision makers.

B2B AI is a consortium-led initiative from Natify and Aalto University, Finland’s highest ranked university in business and technology strongly recognized for their pioneering deep learning and Approximate Bayesian Modelling competencies. Additionally, the B2B AI consortium includes three other Finnish companies.

“We are extremely excited about the initiative and strongly believe that Natify will successfully deliver and financially benefit from the initiative’s total budget of over $4.5M”, says Natify Co-founder and VP Product Strategy Ville Maila. B2B AI research initiative will help Natify widen its value proposition and further its lead in the performance driven ABM space over well-funded competitors such as Demandbase that recently received funding of $65M to grow its own ABM platform.

Natify was founded by Maila and Stahlberg, who have got previous exits totaling $3.4M under their belt. Without any external funding or significant investments in sales, the company has managed to grow from zero to over $112K monthly recurring revenue. In only 7 months, Natify has added 24 enterprise clients. The two founders believe the only way to stay ahead of the competition, largely coming from the US and to reach the $100M revenue milestone by 2022 will be through bold investment into R&D. Half of the company headcount working on R&D and B2B AI research initiative will boost the focus even further.